Data Scientist

Data Scientist
Work base to be confirmed with travel as required
Salary to be confirmed

Do you live and breathe data and complex statistics? Do you have a deep passion for education and a firm belief in the power of data and analytics to improve it? Are you an advocate of the scientific method for whom excellence is the norm? Are you ready to help lead and shape Tribal’s data science strategy? If so, we have just the role for you!

Here at Tribal, we work across many areas of education in our quest to improve the lives of millions of people. You will join our data science team who is building a student early warning and intervention platform. The platform uses predictive analytics and machine learning to identify students who are showing signs of being at risk and who may benefit from further support or intervention.

What does the job involve?

The platform uses data from multiple sources to train machine learning models that can be used to predict student risk against various factors. This is where you come in! You will work with data from large structured and unstructured sources, including streaming log data pertaining to student activities with teaching and learning resources and academic and progression data extracted from student management systems.

You will be tasked with the development of data integration/transformation pipelines, machine learning models and analytics methods that are used within the platform to enable customers to understand and optimise student success. You will be responsible for developing and maintaining the predictive analytics engine and developing machine learning models whose performance can be automatically optimised and applied to live customer datasets.

Working closely with product development and professional services colleagues, you will process datasets from disparate sources and manipulate raw data to ensure that it is appropriate for analysis. You will also work closely with customers to understand their student success challenges and translate these to clearly defined analytics-focused solutions that provide customers with insight to help them overcome these problems. This will be achieved by combining a thorough understanding of the education domain and its data with data science techniques and technical knowledge about how to apply machine learning methods and algorithms.

Ok, I’m interested, what can I bring to the role?

It goes without saying that you will be an experienced data scientist with a highly inquisitive nature who is looking for their next career move and the opportunity to really influence the use of data science at Tribal. Your acute understanding of the importance of data science will enable you to always see the bigger picture whilst concentrating on the fine detail.

Along with your love of data and complicated mathematics, you will have a strong technical or software development background and a post-graduate degree with an analytical or computational focus. Experience of the education sector and its challenges and needs is hugely advantageous.

Your enthusiastic, pro-active and confident approach will come into play from day one and your natural communication skills will make sure you are comfortable explaining complex concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Working in a time pressured-environment, you will display meticulous attention to detail and strong problem-solving organisation and prioritisation skills. Using your strategic thinking skills, you will help to identify new opportunities for using data science to solve our customers’ problems.

Technical skills knowledge and experience required include:

• Intimate familiarity with Python’s core data science libraries including pandas, numpy, matplotlib, scikit-learn and seaborn.
• Version control using Git.
• Feature engineering and data transformation.
• Practical experience of the methods used to apply machine learning algorithms to complex datasets. Able to evaluate model performance and understand how to build models against imbalanced dataset.
• Experience of building data processing pipelines which integrate data from multiple sources.
• Experience of ETL and a solid understanding of database design.
• Writing efficient T-SQL and Stored Procedures.
• Database platforms including SQL Server (or equivalent) and MongoDB.
• Linux configuration and scripting (e.g. bash on Ubuntu).
• Building and interfacing with web APIs using REST and SOAP.
• Previous experience of software development using object orientated methods.

What can Tribal offer me?

As if an exciting career in a global technology organisation and the chance to play a key role in a small fun and dynamic team who share your love of data and get great satisfaction from using that data to deliver new insights to our customers is not enough, we also offer the usual benefits such as pension, private medical insurance and life assurance. This is a unique opportunity to become a core part of a growing team who is committed to the success of this function within Tribal.

To apply, email your CV and a covering letter to careers@tribalgroup.com.

Tribal is an equal opportunities employer and positively encourages applications from suitably qualified and eligible candidates regardless of sex, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, religion or belief, marital status, or pregnancy and maternity.